30 Second Hollandaise Sauce Recipe (2024)

FAQs

What is the basic formula for hollandaise? ›

In a small bowl, whisk together egg yolks, lemon juice, cold water, salt and pepper. Melt butter in a saucepan over low heat. Gradually whisk yolk mixture into butter. Continue whisking over low heat for 8 minutes, or until sauce is thickened.

If the butter is too hot, it cooks the egg on contact, also preventing the emulsion. If you add oil too fast, the emulsion breaks. If the egg is too cool, or the butter is too cool, then the yolks also won't emulsify as well. Think of Hollandaise as a sort of hot custard mayonnaise.

A hollandaise sauce usually splits for two reasons; either it's too hot, or you have passed the maximum amount of butter the egg yolks can hold.

A hollandaise is thickened as it is made. The cook controls the viscosity by balancing the amount of melted butter and liquid.

Hollandaise is an emulsified sauce in which egg yolks serve as both the emulsifier, and the thickening agent. The finale consistency of your sauce will be determined by how much fat is emulsified in and how much the egg yolks are cooked. The more you cook the egg yolks, the thicker your hollandaise will be.

Why Does Hollandaise Sauce Break? Over-heating or overcooking the egg yolks is one culprit. Next time, be sure to use a double boiler and heat the yolks gently to avoid overcooking them. The second cause is either adding too much butter or adding it too quickly.

Raw eggs are used in homemade versions of foods such as mayonnaise and hollandaise sauce. Unpasteurized dairy products. Unpasteurized milk and milk products — sometimes called raw milk — may be contaminated with salmonella. The pasteurization process kills harmful bacteria, including salmonella.

"But there are a lot of ways things can go wrong. If you don't whisk fast enough or pour in your butter too fast it'll turn greasy and broken. Don't cook the eggs enough and it won't thicken properly. If you cook the eggs too much and you'll end up with clumpy, greasy, scrambled eggs.

You keep whisking the mixture as you add the melted butter because you want to break it up into tiny, tiny drops. Each tiny drop ends up surrounded by emulsifiers . But to give the emulsifiers a helping hand, you need to keep the butter from gathering in a big glob.

Don't bother with whisking raw yolks over a double boiler. This method starts with hard-cooked yolks. Hollandaise sauce is a pillar in the condiment community (along with its fellow mother sauces) but it can be intimidating to make.

Does butter have to be clarified for hollandaise? ›

Butter OR Ghee / clarified butter – butter is the fat used in Hollandaise Sauce. For a more concentrated buttery flavour, you can use ghee or clarified butter, if you happen to have either on hand. But there's no need to get it specifically – you'll see in the recipe that I discard the milk solids in the melted butter.

If the heat is too high, the egg yolks will curdle and the sauce will become grainy. When a sauce splits, this means that the fat has separated from the egg foam (the sauce has lost its emulsion). The result will look thin, greasy, and lumpy.

Make sure the butter is between 130-140 degrees Fahrenheit (55-60 degrees Celsius). While constantly whisking, add the butter to the sabayon in a steady stream. Add enough butter until you achieve a somewhat thick consistency.

Poached or sauteed chicken breasts are served with a rich buttery Hollandaise sauce are served with hot cooked rice. The chicken breasts are simply poached or sauteed then they're placed on rice, topped with rich homemade hollandaise sauce.

The classical ingredients of hollandaise sauce are egg yolks, melted (often clarified) butter, mixture of water and wine vinegar and occasionally a drop of lemon juice. Structurally it is both an emulsion and a foam. As with all great gastronomic inventions, the history and the inventor of hollandaise sauce is unknown.

The butter breaks into minute droplets, while the egg yolk acts as an emulsifier, helping to keep those droplets dispersed, as well as thickening the sauce. What you get is a creamy, smooth sauce with a rich texture and mild flavor, perfect for topping eggs, fish, or vegetables.